The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Somewhat Unclear, Maybe it's the drugs, and More Support Stories

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-03-31

Have support-related stories of your own? Then by all means, send them on in!

Somewhat Unclear (from Bob S)
After working in Tech Support for several years, I have come to value the rare request that actually contains enough information to solve the problem. Below is the worst technical support request I have received so far. The kicker is that it arrived with no subject line, no signature, and of course no attachment.

142 comments - Last comment @ 2011-04-08

Prank'd

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-03-29

That Saturday, a fierce debate raged in the high school auditorium. Well, it was actually a match between debate teams, so the ferocity level matched an annoyed squirrel, but it was fierce enough for debate club. Since Bill's school was playing host to the match, he volunteered to help run things. During the day, he had plenty of idle time to find mischief.

In an unlocked classroom, Bill found a Macintosh LC, unsupervised, unattended, and equipped with a microphone. In the actual computer lab across the hall, Bill and his classmates constantly pranked each other's machines, and it struck him as a good idea to play a prank on this one. Quickly, he recorded himself proclaiming, "This computer has been hacked. I am in complete control of this computer. BWAHAHAHAHA." Bill placed the audio file in the machine's Startup folder, shut the machine down, and went back to the debates.

167 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-14

The Glitchy SVN

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-03-17

The Human Resources department at Eddy B’s company had a bit of problem. With new people being hired every few weeks, the company’s organizational documents – phone list, org chart, seating chart, etc. – needed lots of frequent updates.

The office suite of choice was Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Edition, but for whatever reason, the IT folks installed Microsoft Office 2007 Broken Edition on HR’s workstation. Unlike the Professional Edition, the Broken Edition would intermittently and inexplicitly delete large and important blocks of text when documents were saved. Broken Edition was also a culprit in ensuring that poor spelling, bad grammar, and HAVHING EVERYtHINGS IN AlL CAPPS were the norm.

211 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-21

The Speed of Code

by Lorne Kates in Feature Articles on 2011-03-09

"You need to help me with this crap!"

Alicia, the new hire, dumped a stack of design documents onto Jaimy's keyboard, and stood over him, arms crossed.

299 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-12

Enterprise Dependency: Big Ball of Yarn

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-03-07

Not too long ago, I posted The Enterprise Dependency. Essentially, it was a visual depiction of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory." Inspired by the diagram, commenter "LieutenantFrost" shared his own "enterprise-ness and despair" with a dependency diagram that looks somewhat like an anglerfish.

But that got me thinking: like a Representative Line, perhaps dependency diagrams can help provide some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day. And just then, Jan-Hendrik sent in such a diagram. Note that each little box represents a class, and a line is its dependency to another class.

200 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-07

Hard Deadline

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-03-01

Lawrence walked through the lobby of his prospective employer. It was loaded with the trappings of a giant government (military) contractor; large glass gew-gaws signifying compliance with industry standard X₂₉-Q hung on the walls beside pictures of the CEO smiling and shaking hands with various Presidents and Secretaries of Defense.

He was shown to a conference room where he met the head of IT. Smalltalk and background questions eventually led into the details of the job opening. "It's a pretty vanilla project. We want to move our old Honeywell system over to an AS/400 relational database before our old 5-digit date overflows on us."

300 comments - Last comment @ 2011-05-23

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